Fenghuang0296

It’s June. Everything that leaked over the last couple of days is June. We know that stuff like Mario and Star Wars and an as-yet-unrevealed HP set is coming in August and haven’t seen any of it. (Might be wrong about Star Wars, don’t follow it too closely. Citation needed. )

Only the back half, the front half stays as a sort of rolling base. But yes, it’s awesome and I would get it if not for the fact that I have nowhere to put it.

I wouldn’t call Ghost Story a Lloyd-focused season, he wasn’t even in half of it. Well, until we find out what MoM stands for, I’m gonna keep calling S13 ‘Ninjago Underground’.

What’s ‘MoM’? And arguably Rise of the Snakes was a Nya season, but not really too . .

Source?

We can dream, right? Though, my Thanos Mech just arrived in the mail this morning. Maybe I’ll MOC one up?

I doubt it. We have seen box art. I don’t think they’ve ever revealed box art with the release leaks and then not released a set. It’s been the case that we only get box art at first before . . it’s just that the Hidden Side box art is unhelpful. I mean, I like it, (unpopular opinion I know) but it’s not helpful. I think at this point we’ll just have to wait another couple of weeks for the official reveal.

Nope, haven’t seen any. It’s annoying, I think it’s the only June release that we haven’t seen.

Avengers Tower is an August release? How did I not know that? Oh well . .

Hey, I just noticed. Out of the six ninja, only three of them get vehicles this wave; Kai, Cole and Zane. (I mean Kai and Cole share but still.) And it’s also those three who have gold armour, while Lloyd, Jay and Nya have silver armour. Interesting coincidence.

He wasn’t in the show. Zane wore his Forbidden Spinjitzu outfit for this whole season, the only time we’ve ever seen a ‘Digi Zane’ was in one piece of promotional concept art. Doesn’t mean we won’t get him though, they did a Tournament Zane a while back.

In fairness, we don’t actually have any proof yet that the board game thing is actually part of the plot. It might just be a gimmick in the sets, and the plot is just the Ninja venturing underground to fight this Skull Sorceror and his orc/goblin/skeleton minions for reasons. Hell, we don’t even know for sure that the orcs and goblins are even related to the Skull Sorceror, they might just be random monsters that the Ninja encounter along the way. But the sets are gorgeous and I’m going to get them even if the plot’s terrible.

Oh yeah, I forgot March of the Oni. I wouldn't have been satisfied with that! Though honestly, I can live without Airjitzu - but I miss the dragons . .

Sixteen ten-minute episodes, so in terms of ‘runtime’, it’s tied with Rebooted for ‘shortest season’.

I think this might be my new favourite season.

Not directly, but about half of it seems to boil down to ‘Wu made a lot of enemies when he was young’. Seriously; Garmadon, Chen, Morro, the Time Twins, Aspheera . . they all fight the ninja because they have grudges against Wu. A few of the others are just people being pricks and the ninjas having hero complexes; Pythor (though in fairness he was trying to end the world), Nadakhan (though admittedly in the early episodes of Skybound he basically attacked the ninja because it was funny) Harumi was obsessed with Garmadon, Iron Baron got wrecked almost by accident on the ninjas’ part Vex was just a douche who got between them and Zane. Oh, and let’s not forget the Overlord, the Preeminent and the Omega, primordial forces of evil who are too cool to have names, only titles. (Can Legacy please give us a physical Preeminent? I want her so much!)

I love all these sets! I didn’t get much HP last year, but I’m gonna get a bunch of these. Centaurs and Grawp are awesome, the Astronomy Tower is gorgeously hodgepodge and looks exactly how it should. The Room of Requirement is my favourite. It’s useful and good for building up the student bodies of Hogwarts, and it’s full of great parts to help expand Hogwarts too. Day 1 buy for me, and I might even get multiple. Privet Drive is cute but not sure I have the space (or budget) . . still I’ll keep an eye on it. I do like it and the Dursleys are interesting enough named characters that they’d be good for my city. Only quibble; what is up with the greenhouse in the AT? It’s so out of place without Professor Sprout . . And I feel like the parts would have been better served making the rest of it better. Was there some kind of requirement inflicted on the designers that the Astronomy Tower set have at least three modules?

Ooh, kaiju would be awesome! Though it would mean few or no minifig baddies, mostly builds as monsters. Also, you forgot the oni. Literal demons. Sure never expected that from LEGO. Honestly, I’d want to see an opposing faction of ninja. Like ‘anti-ninjas’. I know we sort of had that with the Nindroids, but I’d picture a specific team of antagonists, each of which is named and opposes one of the ninja. The only time we’ve had anything like that was the Sky Pirates; sure there were disposable mooks, but there was a ‘core crew’ of Nadakhan, Flintlocke, Doubloon, Dogshank, Clancee and Monkey Wretch who all had distinct personalities and interesting dynamics with one another that impacted the plot in meaningful ways. (Y’now, until they decided “None of this ever happened!” which IMO was the worst plot point in Ninjago history.) There have been other occasions with amusing villain interactions - Krux and Acronix come to mind, as do Aspheera and Char. Same with The S.O.G. too, sort of, but Killow and Ultra Violet actually had shockingly few lines. But, during Skybound, watching the crew of Misfortune’s Keep . . I could almost believe that the Sky Pirates were heroes in their own right. Like, if the story was told from another angle, the Pirates could be the protagonists. I want to see something similar to that in future. Ninjago Underground (S13 - the tag ‘Underground’ was mentioned somewhere, I forget where, but I like it to describe this new wave) has been great so far, but there’s a shocking absence of named villains which is really disappointing. Assuming there is an S14 (highly likely IMO) I want more named villains. Please, no. No more snakes. Please.

What are you going to do with all those green brick guys?

So, does anyone know why Shop@Home says the Wonder Woman set doesn’t release in Australia until July? This has never happened before. Does anyone know what’s going on there?

What about this theme and the YouTube shorts makes you think they design the sets after the shorts? I’ve always gotten the impression that the sets were made independently, and at a very late stage someone decided “Hey, we should have tie-in media!” and left some poor writer to cut together a half-baked series of shorts based on the sets. Literally the only evidence that the shorts have any impact on the sets is El Fuego’s death and subsequent possession of a plastic classroom skeleton. So that implies that they talk, at least. But there are a lot of inconsistencies especially in the first ‘season’; based on the short, shouldn’t the Shrimp Boat have included possession heads for both of the sailors, not just the captain? And in the short the Shrimp Shack was abandoned, but the set shows it flourishing. (Well, y’now, by the standards of a dilapidated seafood diner.) And, as much as we all love the amazing transformation features of the High School . . that never actually happened in the shorts.

Hey, wild speculation here, but remember we saw a purple Toad house in the reveal videos? Everyone knows those tiny ‘castles’ that are always shown on the open-world maps of Mario games and represent mini bosses and bosses, right? Does anyone else think we could see one of those in a set, as like a smaller counterpart to Bowser’s Castle and an ‘inversion’ of the Toad house? After all, Toad houses aren’t part of levels typically, but they’re still doing one.

The torso they used for Bruce Wayne in the most recent Batcave? It’s actually recycled from Gunnar Eversol in the Lockwood Mansion set, JWFK in 2018. Might have been used elsewhere before, I don’t know.

Does anyone know when the Wonder Woman set releases in Australia?